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Matrix completion is the task of filling in the missing entries of a partially observed matrix, which is equivalent to performing data imputation in statistics. A wide range of datasets are naturally organized in matrix form. One example is the movie-ratings matrix, as appears in the Netflix problem: Given a ratings matrix in which each entry (i,j) represents the rating of movie j by customer i, if customer i has watched movie j and is otherwise missing, we would like to predict the remaining entries in order to make good recommendations to customers on what to watch next. Another example is the
document-term matrix A document-term matrix is a mathematical matrix that describes the frequency of terms that occur in a collection of documents. In a document-term matrix, rows correspond to documents in the collection and columns correspond to terms. This matrix i ...
: The frequencies of words used in a collection of documents can be represented as a matrix, where each entry corresponds to the number of times the associated term appears in the indicated document. Without any restrictions on the number of
degrees of freedom Degrees of freedom (often abbreviated df or DOF) refers to the number of independent variables or parameters of a thermodynamic system. In various scientific fields, the word "freedom" is used to describe the limits to which physical movement or ...
in the completed matrix this problem is underdetermined since the hidden entries could be assigned arbitrary values. Thus we require some assumption on the matrix to create a
well-posed problem The mathematical term well-posed problem stems from a definition given by 20th-century French mathematician Jacques Hadamard. He believed that mathematical models of physical phenomena should have the properties that: # a solution exists, # the s ...
, such as assuming it has maximal determinant, is positive definite, or is low-rank. For example, one may assume the matrix has low-rank structure, and then seek to find the lowest
rank Rank is the relative position, value, worth, complexity, power, importance, authority, level, etc. of a person or object within a ranking, such as: Level or position in a hierarchical organization * Academic rank * Diplomatic rank * Hierarchy * H ...
matrix or, if the rank of the completed matrix is known, a matrix of
rank Rank is the relative position, value, worth, complexity, power, importance, authority, level, etc. of a person or object within a ranking, such as: Level or position in a hierarchical organization * Academic rank * Diplomatic rank * Hierarchy * H ...
r that matches the known entries. The illustration shows that a partially revealed rank-1 matrix (on the left) can be completed with zero-error (on the right) since all the rows with missing entries should be the same as the third row. In the case of the Netflix problem the ratings matrix is expected to be low-rank since user preferences can often be described by a few factors, such as the movie genre and time of release. Other applications include computer vision, where missing pixels in images need to be reconstructed, detecting the global positioning of sensors in a network from partial distance information, and multiclass learning. The matrix completion problem is in general
NP-hard In computational complexity theory, NP-hardness ( non-deterministic polynomial-time hardness) is the defining property of a class of problems that are informally "at least as hard as the hardest problems in NP". A simple example of an NP-hard pr ...
, but under additional assumptions there are efficient algorithms that achieve exact reconstruction with high probability. In statistical learning point of view, the matrix completion problem is an application of matrix regularization which is a generalization of vector regularization. For example, in the low-rank matrix completion problem one may apply the regularization penalty taking the form of a nuclear norm R(X) = \lambda\, X\, _*


Low rank matrix completion

One of the variants of the matrix completion problem is to find the lowest
rank Rank is the relative position, value, worth, complexity, power, importance, authority, level, etc. of a person or object within a ranking, such as: Level or position in a hierarchical organization * Academic rank * Diplomatic rank * Hierarchy * H ...
matrix X which matches the matrix M, which we wish to recover, for all entries in the set E of observed entries. The mathematical formulation of this problem is as follows: :\begin & \underset & \text (X) \\ & \text & X_ = M_ & \;\; \forall i,j \in E\\ \end Candès and Recht proved that with assumptions on the sampling of the observed entries and sufficiently many sampled entries this problem has a unique solution with high probability. An equivalent formulation, given that the matrix M to be recovered is known to be of
rank Rank is the relative position, value, worth, complexity, power, importance, authority, level, etc. of a person or object within a ranking, such as: Level or position in a hierarchical organization * Academic rank * Diplomatic rank * Hierarchy * H ...
r, is to solve for X where X_ = M_ \;\; \forall i,j \in E


Assumptions

A number of assumptions on the sampling of the observed entries and the number of sampled entries are frequently made to simplify the analysis and to ensure the problem is not underdetermined.


Uniform sampling of observed entries

To make the analysis tractable, it is often assumed that the set E of observed entries and fixed
cardinality In mathematics, the cardinality of a set is a measure of the number of elements of the set. For example, the set A = \ contains 3 elements, and therefore A has a cardinality of 3. Beginning in the late 19th century, this concept was generalized ...
is sampled uniformly at random from the collection of all subsets of entries of cardinality , E, . To further simplify the analysis, it is instead assumed that E is constructed by
Bernoulli sampling In the theory of finite population sampling, Bernoulli sampling is a sampling process where each element of the population is subjected to an independent Bernoulli trial which determines whether the element becomes part of the sample. An essential p ...
, i.e. that each entry is observed with probability p . If p is set to \frac where N is the desired expected
cardinality In mathematics, the cardinality of a set is a measure of the number of elements of the set. For example, the set A = \ contains 3 elements, and therefore A has a cardinality of 3. Beginning in the late 19th century, this concept was generalized ...
of E, and m,\;n are the dimensions of the matrix (let m < n without loss of generality), , E, is within O(n \log n) of N with high probability, thus
Bernoulli sampling In the theory of finite population sampling, Bernoulli sampling is a sampling process where each element of the population is subjected to an independent Bernoulli trial which determines whether the element becomes part of the sample. An essential p ...
is a good approximation for uniform sampling. Another simplification is to assume that entries are sampled independently and with replacement.


Lower bound on number of observed entries

Suppose the m by n matrix M (with m < n) we are trying to recover has
rank Rank is the relative position, value, worth, complexity, power, importance, authority, level, etc. of a person or object within a ranking, such as: Level or position in a hierarchical organization * Academic rank * Diplomatic rank * Hierarchy * H ...
r. There is an information theoretic lower bound on how many entries must be observed before M can be uniquely reconstructed. The set of m by n matrices with rank less than or equal to r is an algebraic variety in ^with dimension (n+m)r - r^2. Using this result, one can show that at least 4nr - 4r^2 entries must be observed for matrix completion in ^ to have a unique solution when r \leq n/2 . Secondly, there must be at least one observed entry per row and column of M. The
singular value decomposition In linear algebra, the singular value decomposition (SVD) is a factorization of a real or complex matrix. It generalizes the eigendecomposition of a square normal matrix with an orthonormal eigenbasis to any \ m \times n\ matrix. It is r ...
of M is given by U\Sigma V^\dagger. If row i is unobserved, it is easy to see the i^ right singular vector of M, v_i, can be changed to some arbitrary value and still yield a matrix matching M over the set of observed entries. Similarly, if column j is unobserved, the j^ left singular vector of M, u_i can be arbitrary. If we assume Bernoulli sampling of the set of observed entries, the Coupon collector effect implies that entries on the order of O(n\log n) must be observed to ensure that there is an observation from each row and column with high probability. Combining the necessary conditions and assuming that r \ll m, n (a valid assumption for many practical applications), the lower bound on the number of observed entries required to prevent the problem of matrix completion from being underdetermined is on the order of nr\log n .


Incoherence

The concept of incoherence arose in
compressed sensing Compressed sensing (also known as compressive sensing, compressive sampling, or sparse sampling) is a signal processing technique for efficiently acquiring and reconstructing a signal, by finding solutions to underdetermined linear systems. This ...
. It is introduced in the context of matrix completion to ensure the singular vectors of M are not too "sparse" in the sense that all coordinates of each singular vector are of comparable magnitude instead of just a few coordinates having significantly larger magnitudes. The standard basis vectors are then undesirable as singular vectors, and the vector \frac \begin 1 \\ 1 \\ \vdots \\ 1 \end in \mathbb^n is desirable. As an example of what could go wrong if the singular vectors are sufficiently "sparse", consider the m by n matrix \begin 1 & 0 & \cdots & 0 \\ \vdots & & \vdots \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 \end with
singular value decomposition In linear algebra, the singular value decomposition (SVD) is a factorization of a real or complex matrix. It generalizes the eigendecomposition of a square normal matrix with an orthonormal eigenbasis to any \ m \times n\ matrix. It is r ...
I_m \begin 1 & 0 & \cdots & 0 \\ \vdots & & \vdots \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 \end I_n. Almost all the entries of M must be sampled before it can be reconstructed. Candès and Recht define the coherence of a matrix U with
column space In linear algebra, the column space (also called the range or image) of a matrix ''A'' is the span (set of all possible linear combinations) of its column vectors. The column space of a matrix is the image or range of the corresponding mat ...
an r-dimensional subspace of \mathbb^n as \mu (U) = \frac \max_ \, P_U e_i\, ^2 , where P_U is the orthogonal projection onto U . Incoherence then asserts that given the
singular value decomposition In linear algebra, the singular value decomposition (SVD) is a factorization of a real or complex matrix. It generalizes the eigendecomposition of a square normal matrix with an orthonormal eigenbasis to any \ m \times n\ matrix. It is r ...
U\Sigma V^\dagger of the m by n matrix M, # \mu (U), \; \mu (V) \leq \mu_0 # The entries of \sum_k u_k v_k ^\dagger have magnitudes upper bounded by \mu_1 \sqrt for some \mu_0, \; \mu_1.


Low rank matrix completion with noise

In real world application, one often observe only a few entries corrupted at least by a small amount of noise. For example, in the Netflix problem, the ratings are uncertain. Candès and Plan showed that it is possible to fill in the many missing entries of large low-rank matrices from just a few noisy samples by nuclear norm minimization. The noisy model assumes that we observe Y_ = M_ + Z_, (i,j) \in \Omega, where is a noise term. Note that the noise can be either stochastic or deterministic. Alternatively the model can be expressed as P_\Omega(Y) = P_\Omega(M) + P_\Omega(Z), where Z is an n \times n matrix with entries Z_ for (i,j) \in \Omega assuming that \, P_\Omega(Z)\, _F\leq\delta for some \delta > 0 .To recover the incomplete matrix, we try to solve the following optimization problem: \begin & \underset & \, X\, _* \\ & \text & \, P_\Omega(X-Y)\, _F \leq \delta\\ \end Among all matrices consistent with the data, find the one with minimum nuclear norm. Candès and Plan have shown that this reconstruction is accurate. They have proved that when perfect noiseless recovery occurs, then matrix completion is stable vis a vis perturbations. The error is proportional to the noise level \delta. Therefore, when the noise level is small, the error is small. Here the matrix completion problem does not obey the restricted isometry property (RIP). For matrices, the RIP would assume that the sampling operator obeys (1-\delta)\, X\, ^2_F \leq \frac\, P_\Omega(X)\, ^2_F \leq (1+\delta)\, X\, ^2_F for all matrices X with sufficiently small rank and \delta<1 sufficiently small. The methods are also applicable to sparse signal recovery problems in which the RIP does not hold.


High rank matrix completion

The high rank matrix completion in general is
NP-Hard In computational complexity theory, NP-hardness ( non-deterministic polynomial-time hardness) is the defining property of a class of problems that are informally "at least as hard as the hardest problems in NP". A simple example of an NP-hard pr ...
. However, with certain assumptions, some incomplete high rank matrix or even full rank matrix can be completed. Eriksson, Balzano and Nowak have considered the problem of completing a matrix with the assumption that the columns of the matrix belong to a union of multiple low-rank subspaces. Since the columns belong to a union of subspaces, the problem may be viewed as a missing-data version of the subspace clustering problem. Let X be an n \times N matrix whose (complete) columns lie in a union of at most k subspaces, each of rank \leq r < n, and assume N \gg kn. Eriksson, Balzano and Nowak showed that under mild assumptions each column of X can be perfectly recovered with high probability from an incomplete version so long as at least CrN\log^2(n) entries of X are observed uniformly at random, with C>1 a constant depending on the usual incoherence conditions, the geometrical arrangement of subspaces, and the distribution of columns over the subspaces. The algorithm involves several steps: (1) local neighborhoods; (2) local subspaces; (3) subspace refinement; (4) full matrix completion. This method can be applied to Internet distance matrix completion and topology identification.


Algorithms for Low-Rank Matrix Completion

Various matrix completion algorithms have been proposed. These includes convex relaxation-based algorithm, gradient-based algorithm, and alternating minimization-based algorithm.


Convex relaxation

The rank minimization problem is
NP-hard In computational complexity theory, NP-hardness ( non-deterministic polynomial-time hardness) is the defining property of a class of problems that are informally "at least as hard as the hardest problems in NP". A simple example of an NP-hard pr ...
. One approach, proposed by Candès and Recht, is to form a
convex Convex or convexity may refer to: Science and technology * Convex lens, in optics Mathematics * Convex set, containing the whole line segment that joins points ** Convex polygon, a polygon which encloses a convex set of points ** Convex polytop ...
relaxation of the problem and minimize the nuclear norm \, M\, _* (which gives the sum of the
singular value In mathematics, in particular functional analysis, the singular values, or ''s''-numbers of a compact operator T: X \rightarrow Y acting between Hilbert spaces X and Y, are the square roots of the (necessarily non-negative) eigenvalues of the se ...
s of M) instead of \text(M) (which counts the number of non zero
singular value In mathematics, in particular functional analysis, the singular values, or ''s''-numbers of a compact operator T: X \rightarrow Y acting between Hilbert spaces X and Y, are the square roots of the (necessarily non-negative) eigenvalues of the se ...
s of M). This is analogous to minimizing the L1- norm rather than the L0- norm for vectors. The
convex Convex or convexity may refer to: Science and technology * Convex lens, in optics Mathematics * Convex set, containing the whole line segment that joins points ** Convex polygon, a polygon which encloses a convex set of points ** Convex polytop ...
relaxation can be solved using
semidefinite programming Semidefinite programming (SDP) is a subfield of convex optimization concerned with the optimization of a linear objective function (a user-specified function that the user wants to minimize or maximize) over the intersection of the cone of positiv ...
(SDP) by noticing that the optimization problem is equivalent to \begin & \underset & & \text (W_1) + \text (W_2) \\ & \text & & X_ = M_ \;\; \forall i,j \in E\\ & & & \begin W_1 & X \\ X^T & W_2 \end \succeq 0 \end The complexity of using SDP to solve the convex relaxation is O(\text(m,n)^4). State of the art solvers like SDPT3 can only handle matrices of size up to 100 by 100 An alternative first order method that approximately solves the convex relaxation is the Singular Value Thresholding Algorithm introduced by Cai, Candès and Shen. Candès and Recht show, using the study of random variables on
Banach space In mathematics, more specifically in functional analysis, a Banach space (pronounced ) is a complete normed vector space. Thus, a Banach space is a vector space with a metric that allows the computation of vector length and distance between ve ...
s, that if the number of observed entries is on the order of \maxnr \log n (assume without loss of generality m < n), the rank minimization problem has a unique solution which also happens to be the solution of its convex relaxation with probability 1-\frac for some constant c. If the rank of M is small ( r \leq \frac), the size of the set of observations reduces to the order of \mu_0 n^ r \log n. These results are near optimal, since the minimum number of entries that must be observed for the matrix completion problem to not be underdetermined is on the order of nr \log n. This result has been improved by Candès and Tao. They achieve bounds that differ from the optimal bounds only by
polylogarithm In mathematics, the polylogarithm (also known as Jonquière's function, for Alfred Jonquière) is a special function of order and argument . Only for special values of does the polylogarithm reduce to an elementary function such as the natu ...
ic factors by strengthening the assumptions. Instead of the incoherence property, they assume the strong incoherence property with parameter \mu_3. This property states that: # , \langle e_a, P_U e_ \rangle - \frac 1_ , \leq \mu_3 \frac for a, a' \leq m and , \langle e_b, P_U e_ \rangle - \frac 1_ , \leq \mu_3 \frac for b, b' \leq n # The entries of \sum_i u_i v_i^\dagger are bounded in magnitude by \mu_3 \sqrt Intuitively, strong incoherence of a matrix U asserts that the orthogonal projections of standard basis vectors to U has magnitudes that have high likelihood if the singular vectors were distributed randomly. Candès and Tao find that when r is O(1) and the number of observed entries is on the order of \mu_3^4 n(\log n)^2, the rank minimization problem has a unique solution which also happens to be the solution of its convex relaxation with probability 1-\frac for some constant c. For arbitrary r, the number of observed entries sufficient for this assertion hold true is on the order of \mu_3^2 nr (\log n)^6 Another convex relaxation approach is to minimize the Frobenius squared norm under a rank constraint. This is equivalent to solving \begin & \underset & & \Vert X \Vert_F^2 \\ & \text & & X_ = M_ \;\; \forall i,j \in E\\ & & & \text(X) \leq k. \end By introducing an orthogonal projection matrix Y (meaning Y^2=Y, Y=Y') to model the rank of X via X=YX, \text(Y)\leq k and taking this problem's convex relaxation, we obtain the following semidefinite program \begin & \underset & & \text(\theta) \\ & \text & & X_ = M_ \;\; \forall i,j \in E\\ & & & \text(Y) \leq k, 0 \preceq Y \preceq I\\ & & & \begin Y & X \\ X^\top & \theta \end\succeq 0. \end If Y is a projection matrix (i.e., has binary eigenvalues) in this relaxation, then the relaxation is tight. Otherwise, it gives a valid lower bound on the overall objective. Moreover, it can be converted into a feasible solution with a (slightly) larger objective by rounding the eigenvalues of Y greedily. Remarkably, this convex relaxation can be solved by alternating minimization on X and Y without solving any SDPs, and thus it scales beyond the typical numerical limits of state-of-the-art SDP solvers like SDPT3 or Mosek. This approach is a special case of a more general reformulation technique, which can be applied to obtain a valid lower bound on any low-rank problem with a trace-matrix-convex objective.


Gradient descent

Keshavan, Montanari and Oh consider a variant of matrix completion where the
rank Rank is the relative position, value, worth, complexity, power, importance, authority, level, etc. of a person or object within a ranking, such as: Level or position in a hierarchical organization * Academic rank * Diplomatic rank * Hierarchy * H ...
of the m by n matrix M, which is to be recovered, is known to be r. They assume
Bernoulli sampling In the theory of finite population sampling, Bernoulli sampling is a sampling process where each element of the population is subjected to an independent Bernoulli trial which determines whether the element becomes part of the sample. An essential p ...
of entries, constant aspect ratio \frac, bounded magnitude of entries of M (let the upper bound be M_), and constant
condition number In numerical analysis, the condition number of a function measures how much the output value of the function can change for a small change in the input argument. This is used to measure how sensitive a function is to changes or errors in the inpu ...
\frac (where \sigma_1 and \sigma_r are the largest and smallest
singular value In mathematics, in particular functional analysis, the singular values, or ''s''-numbers of a compact operator T: X \rightarrow Y acting between Hilbert spaces X and Y, are the square roots of the (necessarily non-negative) eigenvalues of the se ...
s of M respectively). Further, they assume the two incoherence conditions are satisfied with \mu_0 and \mu_1 \frac where \mu_0 and \mu_1 are constants. Let M^E be a matrix that matches M on the set E of observed entries and is 0 elsewhere. They then propose the following algorithm: # Trim M^E by removing all observations from columns with degree larger than \frac by setting the entries in the columns to 0. Similarly remove all observations from rows with degree larger than \frac. # Project M^E onto its first r principal components. Call the resulting matrix \text(M^E). # Solve \min_ \min_ \frac \sum_ (M_ - (XSY^\dagger)_)^2 + \rho G(X,Y) where G(X,Y) is some regularization function by
gradient descent In mathematics, gradient descent (also often called steepest descent) is a first-order iterative optimization algorithm for finding a local minimum of a differentiable function. The idea is to take repeated steps in the opposite direction of ...
with
line search In optimization, the line search strategy is one of two basic iterative approaches to find a local minimum \mathbf^* of an objective function f:\mathbb R^n\to\mathbb R. The other approach is trust region. The line search approach first finds a ...
. Initialize X,\;Y at X_0,\;Y_0 where \text(M_E) = X_0 S_0 Y_0^\dagger. Set G(X,Y) as some function forcing X, \; Y to remain incoherent throughout gradient descent if X_0 and Y_0 are incoherent. # Return the matrix XSY^\dagger. Steps 1 and 2 of the algorithm yield a matrix \text(M^E) very close to the true matrix M (as measured by the root mean square error (RMSE)) with high probability. In particular, with probability 1-\frac, \frac \, M - \text(M^E) \, _F^2 \leq C \frac \sqrt for some constant C. \, \cdot \, _F denotes the Frobenius norm. Note that the full suite of assumptions is not needed for this result to hold. The incoherence condition, for example, only comes into play in exact reconstruction. Finally, although trimming may seem counter intuitive as it involves throwing out information, it ensures projecting M^E onto its first r principal components gives more information about the underlying matrix M than about the observed entries. In Step 3, the space of candidate matrices X,\;Y can be reduced by noticing that the inner minimization problem has the same solution for (X,Y) as for (XQ,YR) where Q and R are
orthonormal In linear algebra, two vectors in an inner product space are orthonormal if they are orthogonal (or perpendicular along a line) unit vectors. A set of vectors form an orthonormal set if all vectors in the set are mutually orthogonal and all of un ...
r by r matrices. Then
gradient descent In mathematics, gradient descent (also often called steepest descent) is a first-order iterative optimization algorithm for finding a local minimum of a differentiable function. The idea is to take repeated steps in the opposite direction of ...
can be performed over the
cross product In mathematics, the cross product or vector product (occasionally directed area product, to emphasize its geometric significance) is a binary operation on two vectors in a three-dimensional oriented Euclidean vector space (named here E), and i ...
of two Grassman manifolds. If r \ll m,\;n and the observed entry set is in the order of nr\log n, the matrix returned by Step 3 is exactly M. Then the algorithm is order optimal, since we know that for the matrix completion problem to not be underdetermined the number of entries must be in the order of nr\log n.


Alternating least squares minimization

Alternating minimization represents a widely applicable and empirically successful approach for finding low-rank matrices that best fit the given data. For example, for the problem of low-rank matrix completion, this method is believed to be one of the most accurate and efficient, and formed a major component of the winning entry in the Netflix problem. In the alternating minimization approach, the low-rank target matrix is written in a
bilinear form In mathematics, a bilinear form is a bilinear map on a vector space (the elements of which are called '' vectors'') over a field ''K'' (the elements of which are called '' scalars''). In other words, a bilinear form is a function that is lin ...
: X= UV^T; the algorithm then alternates between finding the best U and the best V. While the overall problem is non-convex, each sub-problem is typically convex and can be solved efficiently. Jain, Netrapalli and Sanghavi have given one of the first guarantees for performance of alternating minimization for both matrix completion and matrix sensing. The alternating minimization algorithm can be viewed as an approximate way to solve the following non-convex problem: \begin & \underset & \, P_\Omega(UV^T)-P_\Omega(M)\, ^2_F \\ \end The AltMinComplete Algorithm proposed by Jain, Netrapalli and Sanghavi is listed here: # Input: observed set \Omega, values P_\Omega(M) # Partition \Omega into 2T+1 subsets \Omega_0,\cdots,\Omega_ with each element of \Omega belonging to one of the \Omega_t with equal probability (sampling with replacement) # \hat^0 = SVD(\fracP_(M), k) i.e., top-k left singular vectors of \fracP_(M) # Clipping: Set all elements of \hat^0 that have magnitude greater than \frac to zero and orthonormalize the columns of \hat^0 # for t = 0, \cdots, T-1 do # \quad \hat^\leftarrow \text_\, P_(\hatV^T-M)\, ^2_F # \quad \hat^\leftarrow \text_\, P_(U(\hat^)^T-M)\, ^2_F # end for # Return X= \hat^T(\hat^T)^T They showed that by observing , \Omega, = O((\frac)^6k^7\log n \log (k \, M\, _F/\epsilon)) random entries of an incoherent matrix M, AltMinComplete algorithm can recover M in O(\log(1/\epsilon)) steps. In terms of sample complexity (, \Omega, ), theoretically, Alternating Minimization may require a bigger \Omega than Convex Relaxation. However empirically it seems not the case which implies that the sample complexity bounds can be further tightened. In terms of time complexity, they showed that AltMinComplete needs time O(, \Omega, k^2\log(1/\epsilon)). It is worth noting that, although convex relaxation based methods have rigorous analysis, alternating minimization based algorithms are more successful in practice.


Applications

Several applications of matrix completion are summarized by Candès and Plan as follows:


Collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering Collaborative filtering (CF) is a technique used by recommender systems.Francesco Ricci and Lior Rokach and Bracha ShapiraIntroduction to Recommender Systems Handbook Recommender Systems Handbook, Springer, 2011, pp. 1-35 Collaborative filtering ...
is the task of making automatic predictions about the interests of a user by collecting taste information from many users. Companies like Apple, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Netflix are trying to predict their user preferences from partial knowledge. In these kind of matrix completion problem, the unknown full matrix is often considered low rank because only a few factors typically contribute to an individual's tastes or preference.


System identification

In control, one would like to fit a discrete-time linear time-invariant state-space model \begin x(t+1)&=Ax(t)+Bu(t)\\ y(t)&=Cx(t)+Du(t) \end to a sequence of inputs u(t) \in \mathbb^m and outputs y(t) \in \mathbb^p, t = 0, \ldots, N. The vector x(t) \in \mathbb^n is the state of the system at time t and n is the order of the system model. From the input/output pair, one would like to recover the matrices A,B,C,D and the initial state x(0). This problem can also be viewed as a low-rank matrix completion problem.


Internet of things (IoT) localization

The localization (or global positioning) problem emerges naturally in IoT sensor networks. The problem is to recover the sensor map in
Euclidean space Euclidean space is the fundamental space of geometry, intended to represent physical space. Originally, that is, in Euclid's ''Elements'', it was the three-dimensional space of Euclidean geometry, but in modern mathematics there are Euclidean sp ...
from a local or partial set of pairwise distances. Thus it is a matrix completion problem with rank two if the sensors are located in a 2-D plane and three if they are in a 3-D space.


Social Networks Recovery

Most of the real-world social networks have low-rank distance matrices. When we are not able to measure the complete network, which can be due to reasons such as private nodes, limited storage or compute resources, we only have a fraction of distance entries known. Criminal networks are a good example of such networks. Low-rank Matrix Completion can be used to recover these unobserved distances.


See also

* Matrix regularization * Netflix Prize *
Collaborative filtering Collaborative filtering (CF) is a technique used by recommender systems.Francesco Ricci and Lior Rokach and Bracha ShapiraIntroduction to Recommender Systems Handbook Recommender Systems Handbook, Springer, 2011, pp. 1-35 Collaborative filtering ...
*
System identification The field of system identification uses statistical methods to build mathematical models of dynamical systems from measured data. System identification also includes the optimal design of experiments for efficiently generating informative data f ...
*
Convex optimization Convex optimization is a subfield of mathematical optimization that studies the problem of minimizing convex functions over convex sets (or, equivalently, maximizing concave functions over convex sets). Many classes of convex optimization prob ...
* Imputation


References

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